Friday, March 8, 2024

Revisiting an Old Design

An email conversation with the architect revealed that the plan I had drawn up as "rev 10" in the last blog entry would cost somewhere between $1M and 1.5M to build. This was not the answer I wanted, but given the insanity in the building industry I wasn't exactly surprised.

This forced me back to the drawing board once again. I decided to revive the earliest plan I had developed a couple years ago with the goal to reduce cost, which involved the development of a smaller barn-style home with a high bay garage on the first floor and a residence on the second floor. The end result was a slightly lower square footage roof but at significantly less cost due to a smaller footprint that would practically halve the amount of concrete and roof framing.

I was busy packing for my move to Florida at this point but felt it necessary to hash out a couple quick floor plans for a barn with a 36x50 core and an shed roof extending approximately 20 feet off one side, and send those to the architect, as well as suggest a conference call in a week or so to discuss these new plans. I called these "rev 11".

By the time the call was scheduled my webcam and interactivity tools (drawing tablets, screen capture devices, etc.) were packed, so this amounted to a voice-only zoom call, rather than the kind of interactive session I wanted. This was, however, the first substantive conversation I had with the architect and her staff regarding my build requirements, my need to get to the property relatively quickly, and my need to approach this build differently as required to reduce costs, including the possibility of completing the residence over time by myself.

By the end of the call I had conveyed my desire for more frequent and incidental discussions during the design process and said that while I did want her begin work on the general concept, I did not want her to build something completely on her own and then provide finished work, hoping to avoid the scenario where she presents finished work that does not meet any of my criteria. Had we collaborated visually or more interactively by this point I probably wouldn't have been so nervous of this exact scenario.